I.Q. GOES TO THE LIBRARY

Opening and closing with a handful of precious but on-target ground rules—“To keep the books looking new, never mark, draw, cut, or glue”—this barely disguised tutorial follows a mouse and his human classmates through a week’s worth of visits to their school library. I.Q. wants the storybook Mrs. Binder, the librarian, reads on Monday, and on each successive day he gets closer to finding it—meanwhile discovering the fiction, nonfiction, and nonprint sections, making a bookmark, using the online catalogue, and at last getting his own library card. Though tiny, I.Q. attracts no more attention than a child would as he scurries about Fraser’s bright, inviting, sometimes realistically disheveled media center. Like Gail Gibbons’s Check It Out! (1985) or Marc Brown’s D.W.’s Library Card (2001), this artfully conveys both the basics of how most libraries are organized, and a sense of why they’re the place to be. (Picture book. 5-7)